‘I am not afraid to die’: contemporary environmental crisis fiction and the post-theory era
‘I am not afraid to die’: contemporary environmental crisis fiction and the post-theory era
In this chapter, Louise Squire introduces the idea that the human ‘denial’ of death has in part contributed to our approach to environmental crisis. She considers the possibilities for literary critique to account for these difficulties, focussing on contemporary environmental crisis fiction. The novels discussed are the three books of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). Each of these books explores the notion of ‘death-facing’ as an ecological imperative. She reads this fiction as being in dialogue with the questions posed by today’s environmental challenges. Squire argues that ecocriticism is a developing field in that the crisis and its literatures are still unfolding, so attention must continue to be directed at reformulating thought in the (also) still unfolding aftermath of high theory.
Keywords: Death, Denial, Environmental crisis, Post-theory
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